Not Your Average Mom

Saturday, March 27, 2010

It is not often that I feel uncomfortable in my own home. Today is one of those days.

I have heard it said that the state of your home reflects the state of your mind - that is, if your home is highly organized, you tend to be very precise and methodical, and conversely, if your home is a jumbled mess, odds are your mind is too.If this is true, and I highly suspect it is, my mind is a giant crapheap right now.

You see, my parents decided to replace their kitchen appliances, and offered their old appliances to me - YAY!! Here's the problem - their appliances don't fit into the spaces where our previous appliances were sitting. My parents (and now my family) owned the Most Ginormous Fridge Ever Manufactured, with double doors, ice maker and water dispenser...to fit in the place of a regulation sized "normal fridge". We now also own a flattop stove, to fit in the place of a gas stove (which I secretly loathed, but because I hate cooking, I tolerated....on a side note, I guess all my excuses about not being able to cook properly with gas will now go out the window and I will need to learn how to cook something more substantial than Kraft Dinner...YIKES!)

Enter GF, who proudly proclaims that he can and will make them fit - by taking out an entire section of the kitchen, cutting down cupboards, moving said cupboards to new locations, reinstalling counters, and building up floor spaces that were never previously tiled because there used to be cupboards in the way.

It all sounds very well and good, and I am sure I will love the final product, HOWEVER, the process is making me crazy. I am a "just get it done" or Tim Gunn-style "Make It Work" kind of girl. GF is not of the same persuasion - he is more the "I can't visualize it until it is actually in front of me" kind of guy, which is insanity provoking in all it's unplannedness.

In taking out all the cupboards, I have had to find somewhere to store all the "stuff" in the meantime (namely my dining room table, any available counterspace, my living room, and the rest of the kitchen - all out in plain view, a la crapheap at its finest!) , and in replacing the old appliances, I need to be patient with the fact that I now have 4 appliances instead of 2, and that NONE of them are in their correct homes, rather, they are all taking up space at various locations on my main level.

To add to this insanity, GF is having a dozen people or so over tonight to watch some big UFC thing (I have never understood nor appreciated the allure of UFC, but then he doesn't understand my obsession with What Not To Wear either). Normally, I would be scurrying around in an attempt to have my house looking "perfect" for their arrival, and instead I am just trying to navigate around pots and pans and Tupperware and power tools.

Oh Good Gravy, what were we thinking indeed? I just pray the appliances fit and my kids are well behaved and nothing gets broken and GF does not lose his patience and that I make it to the other side of this adventure with some semblance of sanity left.....yeah....not too much to ask, right?